Intent to Experiment: WebUSB (Updated)

[Reilly Grant]

Update: This experiment will be starting in M54. The following sections have been updated.

Experimental timeline

Enabled:

• August 25th: Chrome 54 Branch to Dev

• October 6th: Chrome 55 Branch to Dev

• October 18th: Chrome 54 Stable*

• November 17th: Chrome 56 Branch to Dev

• December 6th: Chrome 55 Stable*

• January 31st, 2017: Chrome 56 Stable*

Disabled:

• TBD: Chrome 57 Branch to Dev

• TBD: Chrome 57 Stable

* Stable dates are estimates: https://www.chromium.org/developers/calendar.

Will this feature be supported on all six Blink platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux, Chrome OS, Android, and Android WebView)? Yes or no.

This experiment will target all platforms except WebView.

On Sat, Apr 30, 2016 at 5:18 PM <owe...@google.com> wrote:

Update: we have decided to change the schedule for this origin trial and are now planning to start in M53. I'll post an updated exact timeline when the branch point comes close.

Thanks

On Friday, April 8, 2016 at 2:07:12 PM UTC-7, Owen Campbell-Moore wrote:

Those labels were mistakenly added to this Type=Launch-OWP issue, where they should have been on the corresponding Type=Launch issue. I can't see a way to remove them, but they're not being used here.

The review was approved by privacy, security, legal, leadership etc in this issue.

On Fri, Apr 8, 2016 at 10:42 AM Jochen Eisinger <joc...@chromium.org> wrote:

I see in the launch tracking bug that neither privacy nor security flipped their flag yet. Are they aware of this intent? Do they have concerns?

On Fri, Apr 8, 2016 at 10:30 AM Reilly Grant <rei...@chromium.org> wrote:

On Thu, Apr 7, 2016 at 3:25 PM Alexandre Elias <ael...@chromium.org> wrote:

On Thu, Apr 7, 2016 at 2:58 PM, Owen <owe...@chromium.org> wrote:

Will this feature be supported on all six Blink platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux, Chrome OS, Android, and Android WebView)? Yes or no.

This experiment will target all platforms except Android/WebView because at the moment there are relatively few practical use cases for Android devices acting as USB hosts.

We do intend to support Android and WebView eventually.

"Eventually" means before you send an intent to ship, right?  I think it's OK to minimize engineering burden during the experiment, but I would consider this a ship blocker.  Android has had pretty good support for USB host mode since Honeycomb, and even though few users use it today, I expect it to become more popular with USB-C's allowing charging while acting as a USB host.

There are still a couple issues with the host mode API that makes supporting a generic USB API in an application like Chrome difficult but we're working on it. Some patches for Android support have already landed and more are planned for M-52.

[Dimitri]

LGTM.

[Rick Byers]

For reference here's the original intent thread (has the motivation, what is hoped to be learned etc.).

I'm curious (in part for the larger context of understanding the value of origin trials): do you have any particular customers lined up ready to play with this in the wild?  If so, in what way is an origin trial better than just testing themselves based on the flag?

Regardless, LGTM2

On Tue, Aug 30, 2016 at 12:25 PM, Dimitri <dgla...@chromium.org> wrote:

LGTM.

[Reilly Grant]

We've had developers reach out to us privately to express interest as well the public contribution of a plug-in library for enabling WebUSB on a subset of Arduino boards from one of the Arduino developers.

The goal of experimenting is to allow developers to try out these APIs on real users without reconfiguring their browsers. While in the case of a hardware API like this we can't expect a developer to ship a new product in this timeframe that solely depends on this feature I feel that making this available as an Origin Trial is a clear signal that now is the time to experiment with it and provide feedback.

[Rick Byers]

Sounds great, thanks Reilly!  I agree it seems like a great use of an origin trial, I'm looking forward to seeing the feedback!

[Alexandre Elias]

Non-owner LGTM.  Thanks for adding Android to the supported platforms.  It's fine to exclude Android WebView at this stage since I don't think the infrastructure exists there to run any kind of trial, yet (and might never -- it's a difficult environment).

[Chris Harrelson]

LGTM3

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